Yesterday I was at The Ohio State Prior Health Sciences Library attending the class Measuring your impact: using evaluation to demonstrate value taught by Susan Barnes, Acting Assistant Director, Outreach Evaluation Resource Center and Maryanne Blake, Education & Evaluation Coordinator, NN/LM Northwest Region.

It was one of the best classes I have taken in a long time and I learned a lot. We medical librarians were not trained or taught to think like people in the buisness world (like our CEO's were) and we as a profession are suffering for it. We need to show how we are relevant to our hospital in terms and concepts that our administration can very quickly see and understand. This class taught that.

Two things I learned that I want to share:

START NOW! Don't start scrambling to show your importance when you start to see the writing on the wall. Show your importance now and all the time so you have a track record and your library isn't even a consideration when staffing or cuts need to be made.

Start thinking and using Cost Benefit Analysis and ROI (Return on Investment) to show your administrators that you are not simply sucking up all the hospital's cash like a department of Dyson vaccuums. It is the language your administration knows, so you should start talking in their language. Stop talking librarian-ese.

I noticed that Maryanne P. Blake will be teaching the class at MLA and I highly recommed anybody going to MLA to take this class. It is an eye opener. If you think all this is just to prevent cutbacks your are only partially right. You can use what you learn from the class to possibly increase staffing or funding. At MLA 2005, the poster Showing the Money: Utilizing Dollar Values to Show a Library's Value and Increase the Budget! by Julia M. Esparza, Manager, Library Services, Health Science Library, Deaconess Health System, Evansville, IN and Donna M. Record, Library Specialist, Health Science Library, Deaconess Health System, Evansville IN used their library statistics, applied a dollar values to services, and showed the library's overall value to the hospital. Now I don't know whether Esparaza or Record took a class similar to this, but it shows that with the right tools and know how you might be able to do more than just prevent the erosion of your budget, you might be able to increase it.